The Cinema of the Dardenne Brothers by Philip Mosley

Author:Philip Mosley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: PER004030, Performing Arts/Film & Video/History & Criticism, ART057000, Art/Film & Video
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2013-03-19T00:00:00+00:00

Solidarity’s last gasp: You’re on My Mind, 1992

The conventional narrative closure indicates the problems faced by the Dardennes in a film that was neither fully under their artistic control nor an accurate representation of their intentions. Too many fingers were in the pie. They had to accept the input of their co-producers from Belgium, France and Luxembourg, of ministerial bodies, and of the trade union – all of which lent financial support to the film – as well as of the actors and crew, whose employment did not always reflect the brothers’ own preferences. Considerable differences of opinion arose between the brothers and their co-producers as to how the film should be made and look as a finished article. Rather in the manner of contracted directors in the studio era, the brothers felt they lacked freedom of choice regarding the script, cast, sets and film crew. It was, they said, a film made ‘not against us, but without us’ (in Cummings 2006b).

According to Luc, they were ‘paralysed’ by the weight of a technique that imparted a glossy commercial quality to the film. Yorgos Arvanitis was brought in as a ‘name’ cinematographer, but his concept of the imagery was not one that they felt suited the film. For instance, the establishing shot, a track across the Seraing steelworks, sets the pattern for a series of industrial landscapes and riverscapes that ‘smother human faces and bodies’ (2005: 170) by their sheer dimensions and picturesque familiarity. Moreover, the brothers did not use a video monitor, as they had done on Falsch, and lacking an instrument that would become an integral part of their subsequent practice seriously impeded their collaboration. Their background as videomakers even rendered them suspect in the eyes of some cinema professionals working on the film.

The idea for the film, originally to have been another documentary entitled Vulcain chômeur (Vulcan Unemployed), came from Henri Storck. The subject was the state of the Walloon steel industry in 1984, but after much research and planning that project was dropped in favour of a fictional scenario. The Dardennes outlined several different and unrelated screenplays: one, dealing with a father/son conflict, would reemerge in The Promise; another, about exiled workers, would reemerge in The Silence of Lorna; yet another, about kidnapping, would play out in the child ransom theme of The Child. Eventually they returned to Vulcan Unemployed and began to transform it into You’re on My Mind. Louvet came in as screenplay consultant, while the brothers agreed to share the writing task with Jean Gruault, an experienced screenwriter, who had written for Truffaut, Resnais and Rossellini. Gruault, whose mother was from the Walloon industrial region, was fascinated by the subject. From all accounts the three got on very well together, but the writing process was slow and marked by disagreements among them and by repeated concessions made to the investors in the film. Between February 1988 and February 1989 they wrote five versions of the story. The brothers’ only good memory of making the

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